Content Marketing Measurement | Brafton

Content marketing is at its most effective when it’s carried out with precision — when you acknowledge that it’s both an art and a science. This approach is impossible unless you have a way to measure your results.

If you’re not measuring the performance of your content pieces, you could be pursuing topics or styles that aren’t resonating with your audience or missing out on opportunities to drill down deeper on ideas that are working. Content marketing measurement is the natural way to ensure your efforts pay off.

After you’ve committed to the idea that you should be measuring content performance, the next step is picking the right metrics and KPIs for your purposes. This means choosing measures that accurately reflect your intentions and audience. A good marketing measurement approach means staying away from “vanity” metrics that don’t actually matter and focusing on real value.

So, where do you get started in committing to measurement? First, you find where numerical analysis fits into the big picture of content marketing.

The Role of Measurement in Content Marketing Strategy

What are marketing metrics? Simply put, these are the numerical values that tell you about the performance of your content, whether that means individual pieces or entire campaigns. These values can apply to any type of marketing — email, social media, blog posts, downloadable assets — and cover a wide spectrum of activities, from views and clicks to sign-ups and conversions.

Measurement in content marketing isn’t an add-on or a nice-to-have. When you’re serious about creating valuable content for your brand, it’s a key piece of the content marketing puzzle, because it allows you to:

• Prove the content marketing ROI of specific campaigns: You launched a new marketing campaign last month. ROI went up. Are those two things connected? If so, how are they connected? Using appropriate metrics for your content marketing efforts, attributing customer actions to specific pieces, helps you make more explicit links between cause and effect. That way, you know what to focus on in the near- and long-term.
• Allocate resources where they can do the most good: Sometimes, an expensive advertising campaign is a reliable creator of value. In other cases, it’s just wasteful spending. Tracking the content performance of those campaigns lets you know which ones are worth it, which should be discontinued and which just need a change of direction.
• Pivot campaigns that aren’t generating results: When you identify a campaign that is failing to make the intended impact, tracking metrics every step of the way is an essential piece of the puzzle. If you keep checking the same numbers while you make changes, you can ensure that your moves are having the intended effect.

Having the right metrics and KPIs in place for a content marketing strategy allows you to align the effort with your overall corporate goals. It’s important to remember that this — making progress on your big-picture business objectives — is the real end goal of any marketing strategy, and your use and choice of marketing metrics can help you stay on course.

Which Metrics Should You Track?

It would be convenient if there were a universal list of content marketing metrics that every brand should track in all cases. That’s not the case, however. Instead, it’s up to you to pick which numbers will give you the most valuable information for your particular campaign and objectives.

Setting some key performance indicators (KPIs) for your content strategy is an important early step in any campaign. Your chosen KPIs should be:

• Appropriate for specific marketing channels: Not every content marketing metric works for every channel. It’s important to keep in mind whether you’re using numbers that reflect the way people use your chosen platform, such as a social media network, email, your website or some other vertical.
• Different across marketing funnel stages: At the beginning of the customer journey, making impressions and earning views can be an essential activity. Later in the cycle, however, you need to start focusing on conversions and purchases. Your choice of KPIs should reflect this transition.
• Linked to tangible value for your brand: Doing well by a specific content marketing metric is only truly important if that ties into your brand. For example, if you’re seeking direct purchases through an email campaign, a high email open rate is a hollow victory unless those readers are then making purchases.
• Trackable with the technology at your disposal: The best metrics for you are ones you can actively track and make use of. It’s no use wishing you could have data on a specific activity, and better to focus your attention on ones you can track.

So, considering all that context, where do you begin? Potentially useful content marketing KPI options to choose from include:

• Page views: Taking a basic measure of how many people are viewing your blog posts or landing pages is a good start for campaigns based on search engine optimization (SEO) or pay-per-click advertising (PPC).
• Bounce rate: The next step from measuring raw page views involves seeing how many of those visitors immediately leave because the site didn’t actually deliver what they were looking for.
• Conversion rate: In the middle and bottom of the marketing funnel, you need to think about how many of your viewers are engaging further, whether that means subscribing for updates, getting in contact or making a purchase.
• Video metrics: Video content has its own array of useful content metrics, ranging from plays to percentage watched and engagement with calls to action.
• SERP ranking: In SEO marketing, one of the most foundational and telling metrics is ranking position on relevant search engine results pages (SERPs).
• Email metrics: The most relevant email metric for a newsletter or marketing blast will depend on your goal for that particular send, whether that’s open rate, click-through rate or conversions.
• Social metrics: As with video and email, there are a number of social media KPIs worth tracking, including views, comments, shares and conversions.

Matching the metric to the campaign is the crux of content marketing measurement. By tracking numbers that matter, you can ensure you’re on a path to real value rather than simply pumping up numbers for their own sake.

Vanity Metrics vs. Meaningful Metrics

Targeting meaningful KPIs means avoiding vanity metrics, but what are they? In short, a vanity metric is a measure that looks good for your brand at a surface level, but doesn’t actually relate to value.

For instance, if a page designed to drive conversions isn’t getting those conversions, but is getting a lot of page views, it’s misleading to cite the page views as proof of success. It’s tempting to declare victory when a vanity metric rises, but real success comes from being more stringent.

Matching Metrics to Funnel Stages

One of the most important concepts to remember about marketing metrics is that valuable metrics change as customers go from brand awareness to engagement to purchases and loyalty. You should be prepared to track different content marketing KPIs throughout the customer journey.

In general terms, this could mean:

• Top of the funnel: Numbers from early engagement should indicate that you’re building brand awareness. For example, increasing time on page can indicate that you’re gaining and keeping customers’ interest.
• Middle of the funnel: Engagement metrics and conversions are important as you create a deeper bond with your audience. Subscriptions and other activities that lead to further contact are crucial.
• Bottom of the funnel: Once your customers reach the bottom of the funnel, you need to focus on purchases, getting real value from customers and driving revenue in the here and now.
• Ongoing: It’s helpful to keep tracking customers after their initial purchases, monitoring reengagement and brand advocacy.

Building a Repeatable Content Marketing Measurement Strategy

Making metrics work for you means putting them into play as part of your overall content creation efforts. Establishing a content marketing strategy based on reliable tracking of key content measures means:

• Choosing your tools: There are plenty of good content marketing technology platforms out there today, ranging from free tech like Google Analytics to paid tools targeting specific channels or content types.
• Picking metrics that matter: If you have a strong awareness of your business goals, you can match your metrics to the task, from subscriptions to conversions to purchases and beyond.
• Periodically assessing the strategy: Checking on your approach over time to make sure it’s working optimally is an essential practice. If results aren’t forthcoming, you can shift your approach to measurement to better reflect your goals.

Without measurement, it can be hard to determine the relative success of a strategy; therefore, it’s important to have this framework in place as early as possible. It’s wasteful to spend months or years producing marketing content if you can’t assess its success.

Get Serious About Content Marketing Measurement

It’s never a bad time to add more data-driven rigor to your content strategy. Becoming more data-driven is a great first step in any change of direction in marketing. This is an essential way to prove content marketing ROI, whether you’re working with an outside agency or overseeing every step in-house.